Can two clients listen to the same stream?

[magnate]

Hi all – total noob here, so apologies if this is a really stupid question.

I recently bought a Pinnacle SoundBridge HomeMusic thingy, to listen to my MP3s without having a computer in the living room. I plugged it in, installed Firefly (actually mt-daapd 0.2.4+r1376-1 on Debian Etch), spent five minutes editing /etc/mt-daapd.conf and it worked like a dream, straight out of the box.

Upstairs in the study I have a Windows PC with iTunes. It also sees the daap server and can stream stuff from the same library, which is great. What I’d really like is to be able to listen to the same stream that’s playing downstairs in the living room – is this possible? I can’t see any option on iTunes to listen to an existing stream, it just presents me with the library and asks me to pick something to play. Nor can I see any facility on the web interface to send the same stream to two clients, though I can see them both connected and streaming separately.

Does this facility exist? If so what do I have to do? I’m not averse to installing a new client if iTunes won’t cut it.

If it doesn’t exist, is it theoretically possible? (I hesistate to introduce myself to a forum and immediately start asking questions about other products, but maybe it’s possible with different server software?)

Thanks in advance for any tips,

CC

[rpedde]

@magnate wrote:

Upstairs in the study I have a Windows PC with iTunes. It also sees the daap server and can stream stuff from the same library, which is great. What I’d really like is to be able to listen to the same stream that’s playing downstairs in the living room – is this possible? I can’t see any option on iTunes to listen to an existing stream, it just presents me with the library and asks me to pick something to play. Nor can I see any facility on the web interface to send the same stream to two clients, though I can see them both connected and streaming separately.

That’s really a client issue. It’s been requested a fair bit on the roku forums, but I haven’t seen any evidence it’s in the pipe. Really, it would require client-side support to do right.

If it doesn’t exist, is it theoretically possible? (I hesistate to introduce myself to a forum and immediately start asking questions about other products, but maybe it’s possible with different server software?)

Slimserver has some ability to do that, but I don’t know how well it works with the soundbridge, etc, etc. I don’t use slim much around here. 🙂

But I understand they have some support for it.

Worth a shot, anyway. Of course, the people who really do it right are Sonos, but unless you have deep pockets…

– Ron

[magnate]

@rpedde wrote:

@magnate wrote:

What I’d really like is to be able to listen to the same stream that’s playing downstairs in the living room – is this possible?

That’s really a client issue. It’s been requested a fair bit on the roku forums, but I haven’t seen any evidence it’s in the pipe. Really, it would require client-side support to do right.

Thanks Ron – I suspected as much. I found a lot of discussion about it on the Roku forums, but I won’t hold my breath.

If it doesn’t exist, is it theoretically possible? (I hesistate to introduce myself to a forum and immediately start asking questions about other products, but maybe it’s possible with different server software?)

Slimserver has some ability to do that, but I don’t know how well it works with the soundbridge, etc, etc. I don’t use slim much around here. 🙂

But I understand they have some support for it.

Worth a shot, anyway. Of course, the people who really do it right are Sonos, but unless you have deep pockets…

Indeed. I decided that a thousand percent cost hike was not quite going to give me the RoI I was looking for (£60 for the Roku cf. £600 for the entry-level Sonos …).

I’m not sure I can be bothered to faff around installing SlimServer – I might try it if I ever have a lot of time to kill at home (unlikely), but to be honest mt-daapd works so well it’s not really worth it. The whole two-client thing isn’t a big priority, just a curiosity.

Thanks again,

CC

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